New Article in the Journal of Semitic Studies

The latest issue of the Journal of Semitic Studies (2014; 59/1) is out and has an article that I wrote with my doctoral student, Andrew Jones.

Robert D. Holmstedt and Andrew R. Jones. 2014. “The Pronoun in Tripartite Verbless Clauses in Biblical Hebrew: Resumption for Left-Dislocation or Pronominal Copula?” Journal of Semitic Studies. 59(1): 53-89.

This article is related to this earlier post, as well as this JBL article that came out last Fall.

For the full article, see here and scroll down.

Esther 3:8-15

And here is the second half of Esther 3. I’m still considering whether I will post further in Esther. Even if I do, it won’t be until the end of the month, though.

Esther 3:1-7

This and the next section, together accounting for all of Esther 3, will be my last two posts in this aborted series. Lack of interaction suggests that there is little advantage in posting the rest of our commentary here.

But later in the spring I’ll add a few posts about some of my recent linguistic studies.

Esther 2:21-23

Below is our commentary on the final scene of the first major part of the book of Esther.

Esther 2:11-20

Here is the remainder of the section begun in the last post.

Esther 2:5-10

Here is the next instalment — a partial section. The rest of the section will likely follow in two days.

Esther 2:1-4

So, to make up for yesterday’s long text, today’s is rather short. It all evens out over the long haul, though.

Esther 1:10-22

The next instalment is below. It is slightly longer than the normal post will be (13 verses), but I hated to chop an episode into parts.

Again, feedback is most welcome.

Esther 1:1-9

One of our doctoral candidates, John Screnock, and I are finishing our grammatical commentary on the book of Esther for the Baylor Handbook on the Hebrew Bible series. As we do final revisions before submitting, I thought it would be useful to post much of the commentary here, in sections of 5-10 verses, in order for potential readers to ask questions, seek clarification, or point out confusing comments or typos. We thus hope to make the product cleaner and more usable. (We posted a shortened version of a section of our introduction, dealing with the historical linguistic profile of Esther, here.)

So, without further ado, below is the commentary for Esther 1:1-9, with subsequent sections to be posted one per day for the next three weeks. Consider yourself solicited for feedback!

*Note that the cross-references to our Introduction are not filled in.